“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Monday, June 17, 2013

Craic In The USSR

I had an interview with William Ryan published in the Irish Examiner last weekend, to mark the publication of his third Alexei Korolev novel, THE TWELFTH DEPARTMENT (Mantle). It opened up like this:
Of all the writers in the new wave of Irish crime fiction, William Ryan has a strong claim on offering the most interesting setting. THE TWELFTH DEPARTMENT is the third novel in a series featuring Captain Alexei Korolev, a police detective operating in Moscow during the 1930s, a period dominated by Stalin and overshadowed by the Great Terror.
  “Crime fiction is all about truth and justice and morality, and these are all things that were manipulated in the Soviet Union,” says Ryan. “They didn’t necessarily mean what you thought they meant. Back then they had the concept of ‘bourgeoisie morality’ – you know, what we now consider to be a valid morality would have been frowned upon in Stalin’s Russia. Right and wrong were all subordinate to the political will. So when you have a detective who is basically looking for truth and justice, these are things that don’t really exist in the way we understand them.”
  For the rest, clickety-click here

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